Frieda Vizel: How the World Misunderstands Hasidic Jewry

Transcripts are lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.

David Bashevkin: Hi Friends, and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast where each month we explore different topics balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host, David Bashevkin, and this month we’re exploring outreach. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big, juicy Jewish ideas. So be sure to check out 18Forty.org, that’s 1-8-F-O-R-T-Y.org where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails.

I am always curious to understand what is it about some people that they are able to engage so naturally, so organically with people outside of their own community, and why others are more limited, like they have a much more difficult time. Is it a function of personality? Is it a function of language? Is it a function of mission? That when you’re really mission-oriented and you really, it’s part of your job, you’re in sales, you’re in Jewish outreach, you’re a rabbi, you like have to force yourself into it. I mean, it’s a hard thing to fake. Sometimes I think of it as a function of personality, but I think more than anything, it’s really a function of language, of being able to find the right words to open up an experience, to find resonance in an experience.

The fact that some communities are more insular does not make them less relatable. In a lot of ways, I think it makes it more relatable. This is an idea I heard from my dear friend Liel Leibovitz from Tablet Magazine, who I work with on the Take One Daf Yomi podcast run by Tablet. He’s such a brilliant writer.

He edits all of my Talmud essays, and he one time said something that really had an impact, not just in the way that I write, but in the way that I look at the world. He said, the hyperlocal is universal, and the universal is actually nobody. Meaning, when you get into the hyperlocal people, what they deal with on their families, in their communities, in their stores, there’s really, the more granular you get, the more you drill down, the more hyperlocal of a story you can tell, the more it’s going to resonate. People are going to understand that the difficulties going on in any family, any parent and child and spouses, these things are deeply universal.

But when you come in trying to just tell a universal story, a story stripped of all of its culture, all of that makes it unique, all of its beliefs, all of its ideology, all of its passion, all of its pathos, the way that it looks at the world, then that’s a story for absolutely nobody. And I think very often when we think of outreach, we usually think that the primary motivation of why people reach outreach beyond their community is something that’s very mission driven. Because you want other Jews to observe, you want other Jews to be involved, you want to make more people Orthodox, however you frame your outreach mission, what the purpose of it is. But that’s why I want to highlight some other stories and other motivations of why people reach beyond their own community.

Because I think now in the Jewish world, when there is this awakening, when there is this curiosity that’s palatable to me, this curiosity for Jews by Jews, the curiosity of Jews trying to understand one another as we each come out of our collective corners over the last year and a half, there is this real sense of trying to find the tools to be able to see one another. And in some ways, I look at 18Forty as our mutual meetup spot. We’re going to have a hard time really traversing completely into one another’s community, seeing each other really fully and immersing ourselves. There are so many issues to prevent us from doing that, least of which is just time and logistics.

But there’s a sense that we can all meet together at a mutual meeting spot. And in a way, I hope and my dream is that 18Forty could be that mutual meeting spot where people of vastly different Jewish experiences, ideologies, approaches can kind of meet one another in a neutral third location and connect and just be able to listen with graciousness, with openheartedness about how we contend with our Yiddishkeit, with our Jewish identity. And that is why I am so excited about today’s guest because it is somebody who I squarely would describe as somebody who is involved in outreach, but somebody who does it, I think, in a very different way. And that breaks a lot of preconceived notions of what we think of as outreach.

And that is our guest, Frieda Wiesel. Frieda Vizel grew up within the Satmar community, as we will talk about. She did not continue within the Hasidic world, within the Orthodox world, but she now does give walking tours of Hasidic Brooklyn. And what she really is doing is she is serving as a window into that community.

And what I find so remarkable about her is that even though she grew up in a community that clearly was not aligned with her long-term self, the fact that she’s no longer within the community does not mean, as it means for so many, when you leave a community, you leave with a lot of heartache, with a lot of anger, cynicism, negativity. But she really is able to present the humanity of the Hasidic world in a way that I find so unbelievable and so beautiful, which is why it is my absolute pleasure to introduce our conversation with Frieda Vizel.

Frieda, I’m so grateful. And all of our email interactions until now were just filled with so much graciousness and kindness, which makes me so excited for this interview.

And you do something really remarkable, which is you give walking tours of the Hasidic community in Brooklyn. And you’re not just a tour guide. You are somebody who, even though you don’t currently reside and affiliate within that Hasidic community, you were brought up within that community. So I wanted to really start with your community of origin.

Where were you raised and what was your life like growing up?

Frieda Vizel: I grew up in the Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, which is like an hour and a half drive north of New York City, north of Williamsburg. To your listeners who might not be familiar with Kiryas Joel, it is a Satmar village that was founded by the Satmar Hasidic group, by the Satmar rabbi, who had settled after the Holocaust as a survivor first in Williamsburg and was seeking to create what he called a shtetl, a village that will kind of reimagine or reinvigorate this idea of the shtetl of yore, meaning the Hasidic little community of Eastern Europe. And so my parents moved to Kiryas Yoel before I was born in the early 1980s. I was born in ’85.

So they moved from Williamsburg to Kiryas Yoel.

David Bashevkin: You were born in 85? Me too.

Frieda Vizel: I was born in 85. I know.

I saw. I just turned 40. You still have some time.

David Bashevkin: I’ve got two weeks left.

Frieda Vizel: Oh, wow. 40 is wisdom.

David Bashevkin: 40 is wisdom. So your parents, when they moved in 1980, were your parents from within the Satmar world or they came to it later in life?

Frieda Vizel: So my parents got married in Williamsburg and were affiliated with Satmar.

However, I would say my mother especially wasn’t from Satmar. Most Satmar Hasidim today don’t originate from the Satmar of Eastern Europe. They attached themselves to the Satmar rabbi after the Holocaust because their communities had been destroyed, the rabbis were gone. And that was largely the case for my family.

My grandfather on my father’s side was from Khust. They were after the Holocaust looking for a place and they attached themselves to the Satmar rabbi. My father very much so. And my mother through marriage became Satmar.

So they were first in Williamsburg and all of my extended family pretty much was in Williamsburg before I was born and in my childhood. And my parents by themselves made the decision that they wanted to do something like extra. And so they left Williamsburg, which was very difficult for my mother because she had no friends in Kiryas Yoel and they made this transition to Kiryas Yoel to be in the shtetl, in the village. We called it shtetl.

We would say this is the shtetl. We’re going to the shtetl.

David Bashevkin: The shtetl.

Frieda Vizel: The shtetl.

David Bashevkin: That’s really beautiful. And when you think back on your own childhood, now obviously there came a point where you decided not to continue your life in Satmar. But your early childhood years, did you know that there was an America outside of the shtetl that you grew up in? Did you feel insulated or you just felt this is the world?

Frieda Vizel: For the most part, my world began and ended in Kiryas Yoel. It’s very easy in hindsight to look at these little isolated memories of when you see the outside world and are dazzled by it and to make of them the central narrative of your life.

I have these little memories of being at the dentist’s office and looking at what looked to me like, were they Jews or were they not? They were not like us. And being like, wow, these people are so fascinating and have like little fantasies about being in their world. But I would say, I think if I try to be as introspective and honest as possible, Kiryas Yoel was really what I thought about, I cared about. It was like the beginning and the end of the world for me.

And actually we learned in school that when moshiach will come, God will collect the Jews from all corners of the world. And we lived at the corner of shtetl. In the back of our house, there were trees. So when the teacher said that in class, I imagined God collecting the Jews from that corner in the back of our house.

You’d collect a tablecloth.

David Bashevkin: Very literally. Picking you up and bringing you to Israel or to Eretz Yisroel when moshiach comes.

Frieda Vizel: Exactly. That was my idea of the world was very internally focused, I would say.

David Bashevkin: And you were a true insider growing up in this community. Now, if you’ll allow me to ask, always the most fascinating parts of people narrative is when you get to have that friction.

At what point did you realize that this world, this universe, which is so family oriented, it’s so values driven. At what point did you realize, I don’t think I’m going to be able to continue and build my life within this community?

Frieda Vizel: It took many, many years well into marriage and motherhood for me to come to a crystallized realization. My life is not going as linearly as I had hoped. But there were a lot of things along the way leading up to that, that I can look back to and say, I was a misfit.

I was struggling with social expectations. I was struggling with connecting to the faith. So I can look back to when I was a teenager. I definitely was a tomboy.

I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to study the Talmud, for instance, that the men would spend all this time studying and I would be told, oh, you’re a girl. You wouldn’t understand. I really didn’t like that. To me, it was frustrating that my mother would say it of us like, oh, we don’t understand.

That very naturally frustrated me. So there were these little things in my childhood that I would say I bristled against. I was too independent minded. I would get hotheaded about things that felt to me to be unjust and unfair.

And as I got older, more and more pieces of that expanded. And eventually it kind of created this total rift that led to my leaving. But it was a long way until I left at 25 years old with a little baby.

David Bashevkin: Why do you think it took so long for you to leave? I mean, even a centrist Orthodox Jew, with the way that the world looks like now, growing up in Kiryas Yoel, I’m obviously wrong in this, but Jews would think of this, I would have realized that my bar mitzvah, this is not for me.

But there’s something that kept you there. What do you think was keeping you there for so long that the realization that it wasn’t a good fit is like, okay, move to another community. I don’t like Teaneck, I can move to the five towns.

I don’t like Woodmere, so move to Cedarhurst. Meaning after the community wasn’t a good fit, why wasn’t it like, okay, so move elsewhere?

Frieda Vizel: Well, first of all, I have 14 siblings in Kiryas Yoel. I have a huge extended family. I have, I think hundreds of relatives, definitely more than a hundred.

And so there are so many threads that tied me down to this world. But also something about Kiryas Yoel is that it is a very self-preserving community where there was a very strong emphasis on we want retention. We want retention and we’ll do what we can to keep retention. So it becomes a little bit of an all or nothing by the default of how the community is built.

And what I mean by that is, I’ll give you an example. They don’t want mothers to have smartphones, for instance, or they want mothers to keep to the tradition that they shave their heads after marriage, which is an interesting tradition of European origin that the Satmar Rebbe nature was like revived and kept to by Satmar women and other Hasidic groups. Some other Hasidic groups do it as well. But anyway, they want these rules to be kept to.

And I think from a sociological perspective, it’s understandable because the community’s cohesion and its entire ecosystem depends on a kind of conformity. It allows for a lot of good things to happen and also some not good things to happen. So it becomes an all or nothing thing. So for instance, my own experience, I at some point stopped wanting to shave my head, got married when I was 19, shaved my head.

I didn’t have a problem.

David Bashevkin: I have to ask the experience growing up in Satmar, this is your world. When a 19 year old girl shaves their head for the first time, is that a traumatic event? Do they have a way of making it less scary? When you see somebody shave their heads on television or in the movies, they’re usually going through a traumatic mental health crisis. Like I’ll be honest with you.

I think of like Britney Spears. That’s what I do. So I’m curious when you look back at that, is there like a ceremony around it? Or they just give you a pair of clippers and you just go?

Frieda Vizel: No, it is a ceremony sort of. It’s not a fancy ceremony, but the tradition is that the morning after the couple gets married, the young husband goes to shul.

He will go with a shomer with someone else and he’s dressed in Shabbos clothing. And it’s kind of like a time for the young new wife to prepare the apartment and herself for a nice breakfast for the couple. And the mother of the bride comes over to help. And a part of that preparation is to change her look from an unmarried woman to a married woman.

And that involves shaving the head, putting on the head covering and usually giving a gift like an expensive pocketbook that might be a designer pocketbook. So it’s like an upsherin gift is what it would be called, or the mother-in-law might be giving the gift, but it’s only mother and daughter in that experience. And it is such an intense moment. I’m speaking of my own experience here.

It is such an intense moment of so many things happening where you’ve been married and arranged marriage. People criticize me for using the term. You’ve been married in a setup match where you know this person very little. You’ve just been intimate for the first time.

You’re a little awkward with your mother who knows that, but you’re not maybe talking about it. And you’re going to debut how you look. Do you look younger? Do you look older and your new head covering? And you have all of these feelings from a night of so much happening. And amid all of that is packed in the first head shaving ceremony.

I don’t know what it means for some women. In my own experience, it was so lost in so many feelings in like the surreal experience of suddenly being married woman and having this young husband that I barely knew. And having my mother there that I was very uncomfortable with because I felt like she was sniffing me out to make sure everything went well. So in all of that, head shaving really didn’t feel to me like it was a big deal.

A psychoanalyst I’m sure might say, well, I was suppressing something, whatever it was. I can tell you my own experience was it was so inconsequential relative to let’s say sleeping with someone you barely knew. It felt like it was a non-issue. And that’s not to take away from women for whom it is a huge issue, which I believe there are women for whom it is.

But for me, it wasn’t. It, however, became a huge issue later in my life. I started to rethink a lot of things as I matured. And I had the biggest problem with head shaving once I started to rethink things.

Really what happened for me was I feel like it was serendipitous. It was you might say fate, whatever it was. We had a computer, which isn’t so uncommon. And at the time that I was a young mother, the Jewish blog sphere was at its peak.

Nowadays, it’s like a flash in the pan of internet history, but it was like a crazy heady moment that I was lucky enough to come onto the scene as a young Hasidic mother to find that little subculture on my computer by connecting to the dial-up. And in that scene, I started to learn about just how Jewish tradition comes to be. It’s a very interesting paradigm shift I had from being like, what do I know? I don’t understand anything to suddenly be starting to have the language to articulate questions. Why do we do this? Where does it come from? Because there were people online who would give me information, who would say, read this, look up that.

So that was a very big change in my personal life. And it started to make me see everything differently. Things that were a matter of course, they were like, this is how the world works started to become a source of questions. Why do we do it? Does that make sense to me? And almost everything made sense to me.

It was like, why do we get married so young to someone we don’t know? Because this keeps us in a happy, healthy, nurturing, singularly focused family life. It made sense to me.

David Bashevkin: They had some answers.

Frieda Vizel: Yeah, I had answers, but when it came to head shaving, it made no sense to me.

And once I got to that place that it made no sense to me, I didn’t want to do it. Not only did I not want to do it, it made me feel humiliated to do it. Just taking a shaver to my head made me feel humiliated. We went to the mikvah, to the ritual bath before Yom Kippur, all the women went to cleanse themselves.

This is different from going to the mikvah before being intimate with a spouse. It’s before Yom Kippur. And because all the women go, they can’t accommodate women in this intimate spa setting that they usually try to. They just had us all go in five women at a time, jumping, go the way the men do.

And it was the first time I saw these elderly women walking into the water bald. And it was so upsetting to me. It was like, we are children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Why are we doing this? It was so inexplicable to me.

And it’s interesting because earlier it had meant nothing, and suddenly it had meant everything, and I just couldn’t make myself do it. So what I was getting to earlier was when I decided not to shave my head, I was actually contacted by the school that my son attended. He was then three. And they said that they have a policy that the mothers of their institution must shave their heads.

And they wanted to come over to make sure that I had shaved my head.

David Bashevkin: How would they know if you weren’t?

Frieda Vizel: Well, my husband might have not kept the secret. And also, gossips might have noticed. It’s really hard to hide your hair sometimes.

And this might have loosened by now, even in Kiryas Yoel, but definitely in other communities. I think they’re turning a blind eye. But what often happens in these communities is if your husband will stand for you, if your husband will defend you, they will not bully you usually. But if your husband does not have your back, then women can be very vulnerable.

And that was the case for me. This elderly Hasidic woman left me a message saying, I need to come. I was sent by the school institution to check that your head was shaved in order for us to accept your son in the next class. And that, to me, left me in an incredible bind because my husband at the time would not leave the stable.

He would not move out of the community. He felt that that would cause us to start to transition in a way that would lose his cultural identity or what he felt was his faith, his home, his world. He didn’t want to go on that journey. So we were limited to staying in Kiryas Yoel, and there was just one school option for me in Kiryas Yoel.

So it was either my child sits at home without a school, and in which case my husband wasn’t okay with that, or I comply. And then my son is back in school and everything’s back to normal. And I did comply. I did comply because the price was so high.

I felt that my marriage would fall apart over this one thing, and that my son’s place in the community would fall apart. My family would be frustrated, devastated. Everything I knew, my friend-

David Bashevkin: Everything’s at stake.

Frieda Vizel: Everything is at stake.

Exactly. So it’s not like, oh, you don’t like Kiryas Yoel, take this little move to a different Jewish community.

David Bashevkin: Go to Monsey.

Frieda Vizel: Go to Monsey.

Exactly. It can work if a couple is in it together. I would hope that there are couples who can find that kind of movement because I think it’s healthier than the trauma of ripping everything apart. But if people can move this easily, then I think it puts some of the community sustainability of Kiryas Yoel at risk.

So they try to prevent that.

David Bashevkin: And that makes sense because what they’re preserving in the eyes of a chasid is life itself. You understand every community knows that their values come at a cost. Some communities value, maybe it’s the learning and scholarship.

Anytime that you have a communal value, it’s going to come at some price of individuality, of flexibility. And communities that prize individuality come at a cost, the cost of community and cohesion and feeling connected to something. What really intrigues me, and listeners may be wondering in a series about outreach, why do you invite Frida on to talk about leaving? It sounds like the opposite. But this is really what I find so eye-opening about your transition and the work that you’re doing now.

Meaning when you moved away from the community, most people who are creative and articulate and have that sense of individuality, there was a period that when you would leave the Hasidic community, you’d spend the rest of your life writing about going off. What became known as an OTD memoir, and some of them are brilliant. I have close friends and former guests who have written some of those beautiful ones. My friend Shulem Deen wrote a beautiful one, All Who Go Do Not Return.

I’m curious, when it finally came time to leave, you must have had incredible anger and pain and feeling abandoned. How did you find the space to do the work you do now, which is you give tours of Hasidic Brooklyn? You’re the outreach coordinator. You’re the window that allows outsiders to peer in. Before we talk about your actual tours and what happens on them, I just want to understand, why aren’t you angrier? Why aren’t you writing a memoir of how furious you are about your upbringing and your early married life?

Frieda Vizel: That is such an interesting question.

You know, David, it’s something that’s been very interesting as a part of my work as a YouTuber, social media content creator, is I actually get emails from chasidim, people from the community or in the community, have families, respectable people who say, I am so angry about certain things that happened in my childhood. How are you not angry? What is it? Because I want to release myself from my anger. My heart goes out to them. I think anger can be a healthy thing.

It can also become calcified and punishing. I think I’ve always been fortunate that I get very angry and then I kind of forget. It’s like this passionate explosion of how could something so unjust happen? And I’m absolutely red in the face. And then I think it’s my personality that I just, I’ve moved on and I can’t find that anger anymore.

I think that when people say they’re angry, I often feel like sometimes it’s a healthy thing. You know, sometimes it’s not a bad thing. I remember early in my journey, I went to a therapist outside the community and I told him, you know, I don’t experience anger. That’s what I said.

I was so proud of myself. And he said, you know, there’s a form of anger that’s on yourself. That’s also anger. And I’m like, oh, I guess I do experience anger then.

David Bashevkin: Maybe there is a little bit. Yeah. I’m so moved by people who had childhoods that were not aligned with their adulthood, but instead of being the rest of their lives, they’re carrying a knapsack filled with trauma and it limits them. They freed themselves.

They untied themselves from that baggage. When you look back, was that immediate for you or you had years where it was just like still fully upside down? And maybe as a part of this is like, were you able to stay connected to your family through this transition?

Frieda Vizel: Yeah. Well, I definitely went through a journey. There were times that I was so incredibly angry.

I was wronged along the way. I was in a very vulnerable place and people pick on vulnerable people. And I was very angry. I felt incredible sense of this is unjust and I want the whole world to know.

But also I think I’ve always held a bit of a view that while I feel like I’ve been wronged, I can also understand where other people are coming from. And there’s a kind of an intellectual part to what’s happening that I find interesting, that I recognize that I’m trying to grapple with the other side. Like my mother was devastated when I moved out of Kiryas Joel she was just devastated. I so desperately needed to move and she was devastated.

I could understand where she came from. Even while I so badly felt I needed support, I needed to not be knocked when I was down. I needed not to carry any more of other people’s burdens.

David Bashevkin: When you left, does family stick with you after you leave?

Frieda Vizel: Yeah, I would say eventually the anger kind of dissipated.

I still can see how people wronged me and I still think people made mistakes. Some people apologize. Other people did not. But the emotional part has dissipated and I can understand that some people wronged me and other people didn’t necessarily wrong me.

And with time as that dissipated, it allowed me to have better relationships with the people that are from my community. It allowed me to feel more comfortable being myself. It allowed me to find people who would be more accepting of me. And I’m fortunate that my family is really trying to be accepting and to figure out how they can have a relationship with me, even though it is really, really a very far distance they feel they go in sometimes connecting with me.

Like let’s say with my son being in a secular college, that is really hard for my mother, for instance, my father, for instance, to talk about. For them, it’s like a very big distance, but they try. That’s meaningful to me.

David Bashevkin: Because you see them trying, you know, they don’t know the lingo and the cultural context in which you live.

It reminds me of my mother. My mother’s incredible with very young children, like infants until they’re like three, four, but then the kids start getting into sports. But you know what she does? She starts reading the sports section just so she could connect with my children and her nieces or nephews or whatever they’re into. She doesn’t know the lingo and she gets all the names mixed up and doesn’t pronounce it correctly, but you see her trying and that’s like very comforting.

Frieda Vizel: That’s so sweet.

David Bashevkin: My question is really, this is the crux of why I invited you on, which is you do, and I’m calling it outreach because you no longer live within the Hasidic community and you give not only walking tours, but so much of your YouTube channel is trying to open up and educate and give people an authentic lens to a world they wouldn’t otherwise be able to see. And my question is, given your upbringing, given what you’ve been through, given all the difficulty and the trauma, pick a different profession, pick anything than this. How did you realize that, you know what, I could make a living out of sharing the world that I grew up in? There was a lot of pain, there was a lot of joy, it was my childhood, but you left, you’re now still bringing people back and being the window into the world you left.

I would have thought somebody who left such a world, I don’t know, moved to America, moved to the other side of the country, but you stayed and you didn’t just stay, you’re a window into the world that you left. How did you decide that that would be a step or that would be something that you had capacity to continue to do even after leaving?

Frieda Vizel: Yeah, and the height of this question is how is it I come to be on this podcast to be called someone who does outreach? This is the ultimate irony, right?

David Bashevkin: Yeah, exactly.

Frieda Vizel: My whole life journey that I come to this place where I am the one who does outreach.

David Bashevkin: You’re the subject of the outreach, you’re the kiruv project usually, you know, we got to bring her back.

But I look at your work because you’re an authentic window into traditional Jewish life. I’ve seen your videos, I’ve seen your reels, you highlight a lot of beautiful positivity within the community. But I just want to hear about the initial decision that I could give a walking tour of a Hasidic world, show them the inner workings of that world. How on earth did you decide, I want to spend my life being the window to the community I left?

Frieda Vizel: When I was Hasidic, I have felt a gaze from the outsider that felt to me deeply problematic, full of assumptions and misunderstanding.

And I found it very frustrating. I would be, for instance, with my father, we went to the DMV, a bunch of us children, and I could see the people who are not one of us staring at us in a way that felt like we were foreign aliens. We were not normal people. We were like dehumanized and turned into a spectacle.

And I found it really frustrating. I found it concerning. I felt like, you know, we’re people like you, we have similar feelings. We bleed like you do.

We have joys like our lives are much more ordinary than you might think. Just because we’re wearing weird clothing doesn’t mean we are not. And that sense of the dehumanization of people who look different is something I feel very passionate about. It always felt to me like a dangerous thing.

It always felt to me like something that I really wanted to get out of my Hasidic garb and say, actually, we’re people. We’re people. We’re not saints. We’re not godly flying creatures.

We’re not puppets to the rabbis. We’re people who make mistakes, who suffer and so on. And I always had a very strong desire to do that kind of like cultural translation, to do that kind of unpacking the mysterious until it becomes familiar enough that it becomes accessible so that the people looking at these strange Hasidic kids can see, oh, their lives actually are pretty similar. At the end of the day, they just are in a different cultural context.

So when I left, I was sure that I wanted to work in this world. I wanted to do studying and I wanted to do an education that was never about demonizing anyone and actually had an end result hope that it created a connection between humanity. And I actually feel also very strongly about Jews in particular, because it often feels to me like Jews are like, oh, these Hasidim, they don’t think we’re real Jews. They hate us.

And so maybe we think they are backwards. And there’s that kind of chasm that for me, it feels like we’re all Jews. Maybe I have a little bit of a romantic feeling of like, maybe we should try to get a little closer here. And I actually matriculated at Sarah Lawrence College as a student there.

And I was planning to pursue an academic career and I got an opportunity to give a tour and I fell in love with it because it was a extremely challenging and I like a challenge, but it was also not an ivory tower work. It was not me sitting far away from the community I come from and being like, oh, they have these classes and they have this kind of guard, but it was me being challenged constantly. As I was walking through the streets, people would come over and what are you saying about this? They would challenge me. Also, if I tell a group of people, all of the women here are oppressed and they’re walking through the neighborhood and they’re seeing women chatting, they’re seeing women pushing their cute children in the strollers.

I can’t get carried away in my own biases because the neighborhood tells a story. The neighborhood comes to life and all I can do is create a cultural translation. And it felt to me like it kept me grounded. It also felt to me like I had the opportunity to see the community evolve.

I’d like to say I was lucky to start to see how the community changed before anyone else really started to see what was happening before the community started to really have a presence online. I was already saying things are modernizing. The economy is growing. I was already writing about a lot of these things and seeing a lot of these things because I was on the ground because people were talking to me because I was seeing the things and I was documenting things.

I was recording street signs. I was like watching things change. So I felt like being a guide was really the ultimate way for me to do the work that I wanted to do as a cultural translator.

David Bashevkin: I’m just enamored with the term you keep on using because I’m never going to use the word tour guide again.

The idea of cultural translation. Now I’m very moved by it. Translation in general is an underappreciated concept where we usually think translation is taking a word from one language and finding the correspondence of the word in another language.

Frieda Vizel: Yes.

David Bashevkin: And what you realize when you study translation is translation is not about words. It’s not about text. There’s an interiority between each word. When I hear childhood, when I hear growth, vacation, excitement, all of these words conjure up imagery and experiences and interiority.

And what we’re really doing when we translate words is we are translating not the words, but the experience, the culture.

Frieda Vizel: Exactly.

David Bashevkin: You know, there are a lot of people who translate Jewish texts, but you translate Jewish lives. And to me, that is holy work.

I mean, Rebbe Nachman talks about the holiness of translation, of finding holiness, even in the other language, even when it’s in a new vehicle, in a new clothing, so to speak, and that you’re literally a cultural translator. So I’m so curious, has your tour changed from the early years? I mean, the community has changed. I want to know, what are the hidden spots and characters that you like to show that you see really opens up the eyes of your, what do you call them?

Frieda Vizel: My guests.

David Bashevkin: Your guests.

Okay. Your guests. I love that. You bring them into a world.

So they’re guests in this culturally translated world. Do you have favorite spots or even favorite characters that you know on the streets that you love to introduce people to?

Frieda Vizel: Yeah. Oh man. Absolutely.

For instance, we go to a bagel place where we get the crunchy fried lox. Say

David Bashevkin: it one more time for me. I just got so much joy. And I know my listeners just do it one more time because it was flawless.

Frieda Vizel: You have to go to Williamsburg Bagel on Roebling and get the crunchy fried lox. There is this lovely gentleman who actually is a childhood classmate of my father’s. His name is Mr. Stasel, who works there and who is full of humor and generosity to me and to my guests. And we taste the bagel that has lox and several other things.

It’s heavenly. But something he will sometimes say out of the blue to our guests is we don’t have bacon, egg, cheese. So when he first said it, I said, Mr. Stasel, why are you bringing up bacon, egg, and cheese? He said, people are asking me about bacon, egg, cheese. So I said, we don’t have.

I asked them what bacon, egg, cheese is. And they told me it’s meat. So I told them to go to Gottlieb’s. So I tell Mr. Stasel, Mr. Stasel, bacon is chazer.

He said, I thought pig is chazer. And he’s so sweet. He’s lived in New York for so many years. Real salt of the earth guy.

You know, this is an example where he can speak of his life. It’s lovely, but maybe you need a cultural translator to explain why he would even bring up something like bacon, egg, and cheese and think that you should go to Gottlieb’s to get bacon, which is across the street. And of course, he’s not even coming into contact with the bacon, egg, and cheese culture to even know what it is. And his contact is so minimal that he doesn’t understand what he’s saying when he’s offering that up.

And it’s so endearing and it reflects kind of that he exists in a different world. He will also be incredibly forthcoming in talking about his family. Like he loves to joke that he doesn’t know how many grandchildren he has because while we’re talking, I might already have another grandchild. It’s very sweet.

And when people come through the neighborhood and eat something that’s really delicious and talk to someone like that, they’re not getting the sanctified PR story from Satmar headquarters.

David Bashevkin: The brochure.

Frieda Vizel: Exactly, which I really don’t love. They’re getting humanity. They’re getting a person who’s politically incorrect, who is generous, who’s so sweet, always give something sweet to the children. If you see someone in the group who seems to be spaced out, he will always draw them.

And you can see a kindness that doesn’t matter if he has side curls, if he looks very different, if he doesn’t know a lot of like bacon, egg, and cheese that many other people would know about, he seems like a person. And these characters are like the highlight for me will go to different shops. I love the toy store.

David Bashevkin: There was a documentary ages ago that you must have seen because you’re the modern embodiment of this called A Life Apart.

Frieda Vizel: Yeah.

David Bashevkin: That was on PBS. And in that documentary, I have a friend named Rav Judah, we have the same favorite character in that documentary, who’s Moshe, the fish guy. And in that documentary, they come in with the video cameras. And they said right away, he gets very frazzled.

He says, well, like, you know, we don’t do pictures, what’s happening? Then he asked, he says, is this for your parnasa? Are you doing this for work to make a living? And right away, when they say yes, he says, come on in. Yeah, they want to help each other. This is your livelihood. I want to help you with it.

So I’m curious for you, when you come in, there has to be even a gendered component. You’re a woman, you’re walking in the street with other people who are clearly not Hasidic. How do you avoid getting into like an ugliness? How do you avoid somebody who may misinterpret what you’re doing? Has it ever happened that you’re going through the street and like it gets heated? Get out of here? What do you leave us alone? What are you opening this to? But I’m sure you’re now well known in the community. But how did you earn that trust? Even after you left?

Frieda Vizel: Yes, there’s so much to say on that, because it’s not been linear.

I will say to your point about parnasa. One of the very beautiful things that I’ve experienced in this community as a tour guide is people do have a sense of someone’s parnasa is sacred. And I have experienced people coming up to my tour, this happens so often, it’s just incredible, and saying to my tour group, she is the best. They want you to succeed.

They want me to succeed. When I walk with just two people, so many people ask me what’s going on. These are the little things that I feel like, look, I don’t think this world is perfect, but there are things we can learn about, right? We can learn for our own lives. Someone else’s parnasa, even if we don’t like it, even if we think, oh, you’re making us into animals into the zoo, we still kind of don’t want to take away your bread.

And that’s a really beautiful thing. Not everyone has been that way, especially early on, but even not too long ago, I gave a tour to a synagogue, and it was a Manhattan synagogue, and it was not an Orthodox synagogue. I was really excited to show them around. To me, it means a lot to get a Jewish group, because I get a lot of non-Jews.

It’s wonderful when Jews want to learn about this community. So it coincided with the Hachnasat Sefer Torah. They were bringing in a new Sefer Torah, and I saw the posters. I was lucky to know what’s going on, and I saw where the route of the Torah ceremony was going to be, and I calculated to make sure my group was going to see it.

And we arrive, and there is a huge spectacle. There are music trucks. Everyone is out dressed in Shabbosdik, weekend clothing.

David Bashevkin: If you’ve never seen it before, I just want to explain.

When they do a Hachnasat Sefer Torah, which is the celebration after they write a new Sefer Torah, one of the things, and they must all be in a league together, they have trucks that are specially outfitted that have music and have a big banner in the background. It looks like it’s a truck that only drives for these Torah celebrations.

And they’re so amazing. They’re so lively.

So what happened next when you’re on that route?

Frieda Vizel: So we arrive, and it is like you explained, and there are a lot of people, and they’re giving out candy to the kids. Anyway, we arrive, and this one gentleman who really doesn’t like me gets in front of me and blocks my way. And I say, excuse me, we’re walking here. And he says, I dare you to walk here.

And I’m completely lost. I’m like, this is a sidewalk. This is a public sidewalk. I can walk here.

And we come into this standoff where I’m getting really hotheaded. And I can walk on a public property. And he said, you can’t walk here. Anyway, it took me getting really lost and upset and really upset about the spectacle in the middle of the Hachnasat Sefer Torah to realize that he didn’t want me to walk into the men’s section.

Instead of saying, please go there, he just blocked my way. And he has given me a problem before. And that was a very upsetting experience. I kind of ended up giving up the standoff.

I ceded, I walked to the women’s section. But the interesting thing was afterwards, several people in the community came up to me and said, I heard what happened. It was like an event, something had happened. And one person said, why did you pick a fight you could never win? To me, it was frustrating.

I was walking on a public sidewalk.

David Bashevkin: Yeah, yeah. I wasn’t even a, yeah, I understand that.

Frieda Vizel: Yeah.

And that was a man. It was a very upsetting experience.

David Bashevkin: I’m sure it’s so easy to have misunderstandings like that. And you’re in real time.

You’re not in a Popemobile where, you know, you have like glasses dividing you. You’re in the streets, the neighborhoods alive, the neighborhoods, the personality of your own. Yeah. Have you taken proactive steps? And I’ve seen maybe in the last couple years, like there’s a real trust and maybe I’m over-exaggerating it.

I’m non-Hasidic. I’m not speaking on behalf of the Hasidic community, but I see a real mutual understanding. Like they know what you’re doing and you know what they’re doing. What do you think attributes to that trust that you were able to create there? Because specifically you have two strikes against you.

There’s a very gendered, you’re a woman. And secondly … you lived within the community and then you left. It’s seen with a real, and I understand why, seen with a real suspicion. Like how could you not be biased? How could you not be just airing our dirty laundry?

Frieda Vizel: Yeah.

David Bashevkin: How did you get past the gaze of the community on you to really earn their trust that when they see you walking, there could be trust and smiles and conversation?

Frieda Vizel: Yeah. I would say the gendered element has felt especially frustrating. I have often felt if I was a man, I could have so much more access. Not only that, being an ex-Hasidic man, you put on a little yarmulke and people are like, fine, whatever.

You’re a little bummy.

David Bashevkin: Good enough.

Frieda Vizel: Yeah. Good enough.

David Bashevkin: That’s good.

Frieda Vizel: But if you’re an ex-Hasidic woman, then people are more uncomfortable with you. And I had that feeling and I thought that was going to be how it was going to be, that people will be suspicious. And to me, it was fair.

It felt fair. I didn’t expect people to say, oh, well, we come here, embrace you. And I had some incidents where people gave me a hard time. And sometimes I dealt with it by talking to them or getting people to talk to them and explain that I should be left alone.

But mostly my goal was not necessarily to win people over, but just to be left alone because I felt like my work is valuable. It’s not a hundred percent morally. I understand the criticism of giving tours in this neighborhood as an ex-Hasidic woman, but I thought it was on the whole valuable and I wanted to keep going. What changed was a few years ago, I made a video tour that I tried to sell on my website and I spent like $7,000 to make that.

And I made back, I think like $200 of that by selling-

David Bashevkin: Terrible investment.

Frieda Vizel: Terrible investment. Do not follow me for financial advice. So at some point I realized this is not going anywhere.

I put it on my YouTube channel. And the craziest thing was I’m walking around in Williamsburg afterwards. And I had like 200 subscribers on YouTube and people come up to me and they say they saw the walking tour I had done. And that’s when I realized that people are online and they’re looking for relatable content.

They’re looking for content that interests them. They want to see their neighborhood portrayed with new eyes. Since then, I would say Hasidim are very big consumers of my content. They are interested in what I have to say.

They’re interested in how I see things. They might argue with me. Mostly they have been very receptive. Like, oh, that’s very interesting how you see it.

Because I see things like you say, cultural translation is knowing two cultures, right? It’s knowing two cultures and they don’t know the other culture that I’ve come from in seeing things. To give you an example, I was giving a tour and there was a baby out by itself in the street. Now this, I usually wouldn’t say so publicly, but sometimes it would be a baby outside of a shop. And like everyone in the community is keeping an eye.

But I said to my group, see, this baby’s not abandoned. The community is watching. But this woman had overheard part of it and started to pick a fight and said, no, our babies are not abandoned. And was starting to like get defensive about what this doing outside.

And she didn’t understand that actually my visitors often are nostalgic. I remember when you could leave a baby outside of a shop. Yeah. I remember before people called child protective services, the moment—

David Bashevkin: by themselves or with five teachers and parental guides

Frieda Vizel: and caution vests.

So she didn’t understand how my viewers saw it. And in my work, Hasidim can see what the outsider sees when I do cultural translation. So they seem to be interested. And it’s been really nice to see people interested commenting, having comments in the street, but I’m still having incredibly difficult time getting access to anyone.

I have to plead with people to the moon. I’m back. I have to promise them. You get to see every video I make.

You have to make all the edits, like anything you feel is going to put you in jeopardy. And I’ve done interviews with people that I thought were amazing, that were so interesting. And then they decided, you know what? I don’t want it. I’m not comfortable.

It was after the edit was after everything and I can’t publish it. I’m not going to publish something. Someone doesn’t want to. And they’re afraid that they’re going to be associated with me and it’s going to harm them. Shidduchim. Child matches, the business.

David Bashevkin: You and I have a lot more in common.

Frieda Vizel: Really?

David Bashevkin: It sounds like you’re describing 18Forty.

Frieda Vizel: Oh, really? How so?

David Bashevkin: Because so much of the work and I’ve been using this language more and more lately, which is I look at 18Forty as the potential to be a beis medrash for the study of the Jewish people.

Exactly. I was talking about before, meaning I want to show people Jewish lives and we talk about all the different communities. We’ll do a series on the Israeli Dati Leumi community. We’ve done series on Chabad.

We’ve done series on issues and all this and we bring in all these different voices. And you do see there’s a correlation, communities that prioritize preservation, communities that prioritize preserving the shape, like Coca-Cola never changed its shape. The communities that prioritize that are much more hesitant about projecting outwards because you don’t get to own somebody else’s interpretation of you. My frustration is always that it’s those very communities that get very upset.

And it’s not just the Hasidic community. You see this a little bit in the Yeshiva world. You see in the Haredi world, which are all communities of preservation. They’re preserving something very holy, very real.

They’re not preserving a nice recipe. This is their life. This is everything that they’re I fully understand. And very often you see those very same people are the ones who complain the loudest when they’re misunderstood.

My frustration is like, it’s hard to have both. Either you need to be willing to serve as your own cultural translator or you’re going to leave somebody else to translate for you. So if you don’t want Netflix being the ones making the show about you, you have to find another avenue to project, which I hope sometimes is, whether it’s 18Forty or I do hope because I think especially now in 2025, there’s so much valuable lessons that are preserved in a more insular community. That’s incredibly valuable for the rest of the Jewish world, for the non-Orthodox world and for the non-Jewish world.

Frieda Vizel: Yes. Yes. And it’s unfortunate that these preservation oriented communities often have an attitude of keeping our heads down is the way to survive. And any attention is bad attention.

And I will often get messages when I publish something, especially when I published about Kaporos, which is the ritual of swinging a chicken around people’s heads, which is definitely not one of the most flattering sides of Hasidic Jewish tradition. But I’ll get comments from people saying, what do you need to talk about this? What do you need to write about it? What are you doing? What is the benefit? Who is this for? Who needs to know? And you know, it’s unfortunate because in the end of the day, what I see as a tour guide is that the effect of not filling the void of information with accurate information is a lot of prejudice. It’s a lot of prejudice. People come on my tours, having watched Netflix Unorthodox and read a few articles about the Hasidic education system and child sexual abuse.

And that’s all they know.

David Bashevkin: That’s all they know.

Frieda Vizel: When they see a Hasidic Jew, that’s what they see, predators and moochers. I mean, I feel horrible even saying it.

It’s so disturbing to me, but they’re taking it off the information they’re getting in popular media. But I mean, what can you do if people sense is so much that if we open ourselves up, some calamity will happen and they have such an anxiety around it.

David Bashevkin: And they have been burned. I understand the instinct.

The memory that Jews, especially very traditional insular Jews are holding are not just the memories of their own childhood and their parents’ childhood. We hold the memories from like all of Jewish history and we preserve that.

I don’t want to even say adversarial, but there’s an otherness to the non-Jewish world that even you grow up with in a non-Hasidic Orthodox community. I’m curious for when you have non-Orthodox Jewish guests on your tours, what are the most common questions that you get? It’s just like, what’s with side curls? Have there ever been a question that caught you off guard? Like I didn’t even know, I need to do a little bit of research for that.

Frieda Vizel: Oh, there have been so many questions that caught me off guard. I wish you’d asked me this in advance because I know there have been questions people asked me that I was like, I have no idea. And I wish I knew this answer. And this is a fascinating question.

I get new questions all the time. I also get old questions all the time. The number one question I get is, do you speak to your family? Which I think reflects that people ultimately have a strong feeling about family unity. I feel like it’s like something that touches everyone.

David Bashevkin: Yes.

Frieda Vizel: But I think people will ask such interesting questions and show so much of where they come from. I don’t know that this answers your question, but when I started to give tours, I knew very little about antisemitism. I knew they hate us, they hate us. But I didn’t understand what antisemitism on the systemic level of what caused the Holocaust, how the views of Jews was.

And I started to hear on my tours, at one time I gave a tour and I showed a Hasidic cash register, they had made with aleph bet and it was for children to play. A German asked me, is this not antisemitic?

David Bashevkin: Because they’re playing with the cash register.

Frieda Vizel: Jews and money. I had no idea.

I had no idea where anyone even comes—

David Bashevkin: A toy cash register. I grew up with those. They’re so fun. You press the button that comes out.

Yeah, that’s so interesting. Do you have a favorite question that you’re asked that you’re like, you love this question. You love fielding it.

Frieda Vizel: I really like when people show that they can see the humanity, the everyday life.

A woman came on my tour and she said, I just saw this Hasidic give a look to the other woman, what happened? And I could see that the other woman was dressed very, very modern, very like, Oh my, she was back. But the woman who asked me was from somewhere in the middle of the United States, couldn’t see that these two women were actually looking very different in terms of their modernness, how modern they were. But she had picked up a kind of a social nuance, like who’s looking at who, what are these little tells who’s expressing a little like rebellion, who’s expressing judgment. I like that because I think we all know this.

We all do this. It’s human.

David Bashevkin: Of course. Everyone grows up in a home with a values, with expectations, and we press them with our parents.

The familial component of Judaism is what I think makes Judaism so universal. Meaning because we’re so particularistic, because we are so family oriented, there’s something very universal about that. Everybody has a family. Everybody contends with those relationships.

Frieda Vizel: Yes. Actually, I’m going to say on that note, I really appreciate when people ask me about infertility, about not fitting in the box of the familial place, because I think it allows for a kind of a nuance. This is a world that really cherishes family so, so, so much. And it’s visible in the streets, how people help each other with each other’s children, but also what happens when you don’t fit in.

I think that’s a big part of the story that might be invisible without asking. So I really appreciate that kind of question.

David Bashevkin: It’s so interesting. And I just shared this recently on social media.

I had an Uber ride home with a woman. Her name was Jasmine. She was one of the most lovely drivers I’ve ever had. And she was telling me how she has three different children from three different fathers, and the difficulty she had where she felt she grew up in a community where marriage and family life was seen as very suffocating, tying down, taking your independence.

And I was sharing with her that idea that we spoke about at the beginning of every communal value comes at a cost.

So communities that center, that independence don’t get tied down. Family oriented, wanting that groundedness is going to be the not normal, the subversion of the community. And in our community, when you’re very family oriented, it also comes at a cost of the individuality, people who are single, don’t have traditional family structures, can’t have children, divorcees.

It’s much harder. And everybody just wants to feel at home in their own lives. And that’s the work of cultural translation. And I just want one other question, which is really not about your guests, but for you, which parts of the Hasidic world, because you haven’t fully left, you’re still coming in and introducing it to people serving as that cultural translator in that window, what parts of the community do you have the most nostalgia and longing for? Do you find that when you find yourself within that context, again, that there’s something that can’t be replaced, every community has something that’s their essence, you can find something similar, but it’s not the same, it’s not the same flavor, it’s not the same ingredients, which parts of the community, if any, do you still have that nostalgic longing for?

Frieda Vizel: I think the number one thing in the community that I have a nostalgic longing for is communal love of the children, this sense of kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, but especially for each other’s children, because I experienced it very personally, leaving the community with a five-year-old child completely not knowing what I was in for, I was in for being on my own in a way that I didn’t realize you can even be as a parent, where your neighbors won’t keep an eye on your child, they’ll actually call the police on you, the children’s schools are closed all the time, the child misbehaves, the child is sent home instead of the school helping, all of these things were like a way for me to start to understand the beauty of a community that looks after the other children, and when I walk through the streets, my favorite most heartwarming moment is when I see little kids stand at the curb waiting to be crossed, and I can know what’s going to happen, someone is going to pass and it’s going to cross them, and sometimes the person who crosses them looks so frum, he looks so extreme, he looks so in his head with his holiness, looking down, long beard, peyos is flying, giant glasses, like looking like the holiest person and is suddenly stopping for these children and crossing them, that’s a beautiful thing, like I look around in the secular world, I don’t see that, I see instead people are like—

David Bashevkin: We have crossing guards, there’s somebody official, that’s the town’s job, that’s somebody else’s job, and in the Hasidic community, a child knows to wait by the corner, and somebody, not their parents is going to help them cross the street.

Frieda Vizel: Exactly, and it’s actually my impulse to still try to do it, I don’t do it because I look like an outsider and I scare the children, which is ironic, because I don’t think I look like a typical kidnapper, but I can feel in my bones the impulse to look, oh, these children are mine, you know, and that I have such a warm place in my heart for that communal sense of responsibility for the children, I think it’s so beautiful, so hard to raise children in the modern world, and it’s so needed, and I just love to see it, I also love the Yomim Tovim, I really like to see them, although to be completely honest, when it’s like three-day holiday, that’s a lot.

David Bashevkin: Even for those still inside the community, that means you’re, if you told me I love three-day Yomim Tovim, then I would be like, is she really an insider,

Frieda Vizel: Like, has she really done it?

David Bashevkin: Yeah, she really, really come from that world? Nut your Yiddish is still intact, ish.

Frieda Vizel: Yeah, ish, I can speak.

David Bashevkin: If somebody speaks to you in Yiddish, can they tell that you’re no longer living within?

Frieda Vizel: Sometimes when I speak Yiddish, people will say, Frida, it’s looking sad,

David Bashevkin: It’s been a bit.

Frieda Vizel: It’s been a bit.

David Bashevkin: Is there an obvious tell when it comes to your Yiddish, that you recognize what you lost in the language?

Frieda Vizel: My experience is, when I speak Yiddish in the community, people turn their heads, and they’ll sometimes come up to me and say, who are you, I’ll say my name is Frieda Vizel. That’s the, Echte Heimish Yiddish, you speak a real juicy Yiddish.

David Bashevkin: The ultimate, authentic Yiddish. The ultimate, yeah. Echte Heimish Yiddish. Yeah,

Frieda Vizel: it’s my accent.

David Bashevkin: When you said the crunchy lox bagel, I mean, it was absolutely impeccable, but I really mean this, and this is my final question. My last question is really the question of the work of cultural translation. We are talking about community outreach, giving our listeners the tools and the skills of how to project beyond ourselves. How do we share our values? How do we create a model of Yiddishkeit and tradition that can reach beyond those already convinced and practicing? And I’m curious, not even in specific relationship to Judaism, what do you think are the skills that are by nature, and what are the skills that can be learned that make an excellent cultural translator?

Frieda Vizel: I think it is really about observing the world.

And I think I take maybe some of my skills from growing up in the Yiddish community, where there’s a lot of cultural observations. It’s about going through the world and people watching and trying to understand, how does their life differ from my life and still feel that universal thread? How do they have something very different in the dress, in the container, and yet I can still connect on an emotional level. For me, that’s the key to effective cultural translation. If my cultural translation causes you to think these are freaks from a different world, then I would say I failed.

But if I can convey at once the uniqueness, but also the relatability, the universality, then I think that’s the key. And I think in order to get to it, the cultivation of that kind of cultural translation is really about watching the world, listening to people, comparing without judgment, without feeling the need to say, this is a terrible world, this is a great… I think removing judgment is the most important part.

David Bashevkin: To be descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Let me just explain what you’re seeing without…

Frieda Vizel: Yes.

David Bashevkin: I’m not going to be the moral arbiter to explain, but I can be the descriptor, I can be the cultural translator.

I think that’s so important.

And it’s a question I get very often on 18Forty. Somebody asked me recently, why don’t you call balls and strikes on your interviews? Why aren’t you more combative? It’s an ongoing theme, and I get that feedback a lot. And I always say, you can’t be combative until you first understand where they are. Where are we standing? Describe it.

You need a certain level of just curiosity of observing before you even reach any type of judgment. Humans will reach a judgment of what’s for them and what’s not for the m. We’re natural like that. We know when we watch a movie, what we enjoy, what we don’t enjoy.

But you first have to watch, you first have to engage on its own terms and with its own set of inherent cultural logic. And then you can arrive at some perspective of how it relates to you and your life.

Frieda Vizel: 100%, absolutely agree.

David Bashevkin: Do you watch the Hasidic shows on Netflix?

Frieda Vizel: Like which ones?

David Bashevkin: Like Unorthodox was the famous one.

Frieda Vizel: Yes.

David Bashevkin: Do they grate on you? Or you’re like, Oh, this is wonderful.

Frieda Vizel: Oh, no, Unorthodox was to be to me absolutely unforgivable, because it was to me outrageous that a German production crew told a story of Germans being essentially the saviors of these backwards.

David Bashevkin: That’s what I hated about the show, too.

Frieda Vizel: I mean, it’s unbelievable. You murdered the chutzpah, you murdered our communities. Who do you think we are? Fools? You’re the saviors. You’re the ones who embrace shiny, perfect.

You give opportunities that you would never in real life give the perfect fantasy world, a sunny, beautiful Berlin contrasted to this oppressive, terrible place. You’re saving us. You’re the ones who are… That was just unbelievable.

And they got away with it.

David Bashevkin: I had the same reaction. I was bothered less. I didn’t love the Hasidic depiction.

I was bothered by the way they depicted the Europeans as this like enlightened, everybody’s friendly. Come on. They made Germany feel like the shtetl and they made Williamsburg feel it was backwards. And one other just a curiosity that I need to ask you, how do you stay up to date with what’s going on in the community? If you’re giving these walking tours, are you on like shul mailing lists? Are you in the WhatsApp groups? How do you stay up to date with what’s happening in the community?

Frieda Vizel: I am in the WhatsApp groups.

I look at the Telegram groups, but mostly in the streets. So for instance, after a tour, I might go into a shop and browse a little and people will actually come up to me. Recently I posted a video saying, I’m looking for the game called Handel Erlich, which I was interested in. It’s an old game that is now out of print largely because it’s so extreme.

And I said it in a video and someone came up to me while I was in a shop and said, you know, I heard you were looking for it. You can find it at this in the shop. And I was so happy I found it. But like, that’s the kind…

David Bashevkin: What do you mean an extreme game? I assume you don’t mean it’s like snowboarding or extreme sports. It’s religiously intense?

Frieda Vizel: You just did cultural translating for me because it was definitely religiously intense. I was not using it very clearly.

David Bashevkin: Yeah.

Extreme sports is like motorbiking and snowboarding.

Frieda Vizel: It’s not a game like that. It’s a Monopoly game that has a Gehenom as its prison and has a card that says “Zionist, go to hell” as one of the cards.

David Bashevkin: It’s interesting.

I love cultural artifacts and seeing that world, but you’re seeing, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. I’m seeing a change in the community even vis-a-vis the state of Israel.

Frieda Vizel: Oh, absolutely. Totally.

Totally. I see it in the streets.

David Bashevkin: Everyone’s cheering for Israel right now.

Frieda Vizel: I’m telling you.

I wrote on my Twitter the other day. I said, can you be anti-Zionist and pro-Israel because that’s what I feel like is happening in Williamsburg. It’s so interesting because one of the benefits of being old, I mean, I shouldn’t call me old because it indicts you as well. We’re the same age.

Yeah. Exactly.

David Bashevkin: What are you doing to me here?

Frieda Vizel: Exactly. I’m the senior in the world of OTD.

I’m like the first real generation. Now there are a lot of young ones, but one of the benefits of having been on the scene for 20 years is I’ve seen a tremendous shift, especially vis-a-vis Israel. I think the young ones have no idea how anti-Zionist it was when I was a child. I walked through the streets.

I was really on the ground after October 7th. I would say there were almost no one. I know one person that was really anti-Zionist that was not supportive of Israel, of the army. Even if they say we’re waiting for the Messiah, they equivocate.

Essentially, hearts are completely with Israel and it’s like a tremendous loyalty. When I was there Purim, I saw a group of kids with Israeli flags, which surprised me. One guy went by and was grabbing it away from them.

David Bashevkin: But that is surprising that you had little kids with flags.

Frieda Vizel: It was teenagers.

David Bashevkin: But times are changing and even the change, even in the Hasidic community, it’s at its own pace. It’s organic. It’s natural.

It’s never going to be demanded from outside.

Frieda Vizel: Exactly.

David Bashevkin: That’s what actually stunts the natural organic change.

Frieda Vizel: Exactly.

David Bashevkin: I always wrap up my interviews with more rapid fire questions. My first question is, do you have a favorite book that serves as the cultural translation for the Hasidic community? A book that provides a window for somebody who wants to learn more about the humanity within the community. What book would you recommend somebody goes on a tour with you and says, I want to learn more. I want to read more.

What are your recommendations?

Frieda Vizel: These are academic books, so maybe they’re not so exciting, but I would definitely recommend reading at least the introductions of them, which are much more readable than the full text. Hasidism: A New History with a lead author being David Biale is a fantastic book. And A Fortress in Brooklyn written by Michael Casper and Nathaniel Deutsch. These are really solid texts.

You can just read the introduction and it’ll give you a really good sense of the story. Nothing comes to mind that is more maybe juicy.

David Bashevkin: Can I add one? Yes. I’m answering my own question here.

Frieda Vizel: Yes, please do.

David Bashevkin: I love the book Hasidic People by Jerome Mintz.

Frieda Vizel: Yeah. I think it’s very dated.

David Bashevkin: It is very dated, but it’s a snapshot of the first generation of Hasidic immigrants into the second and talks about a lot of the leadership transitions. It’s very lovely and he writes with generosity about the Hasidic world, which I always appreciate. My next question, I’m always curious, if somebody gave you a great deal of money that allowed you to take a sabbatical with no responsibilities whatsoever to go back to school and get a PhD, what do you think the subject and title of your dissertation would be?

Frieda Vizel: Wow. I hope this happens, first of all.

That would be really nice. I think I would study the history of women shaving their heads in the Orthodox Jewish world.

David Bashevkin: Is there no scholarship on that?

Frieda Vizel: Recently, there was something published in Israel, actually, in Hebrew. I’m sure there was a lot of oral testimonies and work to be done nonetheless.

I’m actually trying to get the woman who published it to speak on my channel, but there’s a lot of work to be done on that subject. It’s a very interesting history. Wow.

David Bashevkin: My final question, always curious about people’s sleep schedules, what time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning?

Frieda Vizel: Right now, I just came back from Germany and my schedule is a little bit messed up, but I try to go to sleep 11, 10, 11, I wake up at five.

David Bashevkin: Holy cow.

Frieda Vizel: But I’m a slow riser. Yeah, there’s a process from five o’clock to seven o’clock, there’s a process of transitioning.

David Bashevkin: Frieda Vizel, I am so grateful for your time, your experiences, your generosity, your honesty, just an absolute joy to speak with. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Frieda Vizel: Thank you so much, David.

It’s a real pleasure.

David Bashevkin: I was incredibly taken by Frieda’s idea of cultural translation, of looking at her work, and it’s a term that I find so beautiful. It exactly encapsulates, I think, what outreach is all about, which is a form of cultural translation, being able to make the case of cultural values from one community and be able to open up and provide a window for people to really understand the beauty, the humanity, to look at one another Be-Gova Einayim with kind of a level-headed eyes. That’s a methodology that is usually used to describe a certain approach to Tanakh.

There’s a whole controversy about that—it’s called Tanakh Be-Gova Einayim, with kind of like a level-headed eyes, where people approach it in a very, like, what’s the plain meaning? What are the places about? I don’t want to get into that controversy or even why it was a controversy as an approach, as a methodology for learning Tanakh, but when I think of our beis medrash, our house of study, which as I’ve mentioned, I think of as a beis medrash for the study of the Jewish people, I think in many ways of that methodology that I like approaching people Be-Gova Einayim, which is just level-headed. You don’t have to conceptualize everything.

A cultural translation so you can understand the interiority of other worlds. And the whole idea of translation, the translation not of words, but the translation of experience, the translation of values, the translation of community is something so important and really gets to the heart of why I believe translation is almost a mystical experience. Being able to take and experience a cultural phenomenon that is unique to one community, one set of values, and be able to translate it, to share it, to have the language that will be able to capture the real essence of one person’s experience and share it with another. There’s a phenomenal book.

You know what? I don’t want to call it phenomenal. It’s really, really interesting, written by a phenomenal author. I believe he won the Pulitzer Prize in the late 80s. His name is Douglas Hofstadter.

Douglas Hofstadter, who’s probably most famous for his book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid, which is really about thinking and consciousness. He’s actually one of the most well-renowned consciousness philosophers in the world. His name is David Chalmers. He’s a student of Douglas Hofstadter.

And he wrote this really interesting book about translation, and it is called Le Ton Beau De Marot. It’s French that I’m definitely not pronouncing correctly. And it’s called In Praise of the Music of Language. And it’s an entire book where he attempts to translate one French poem.

And as he’s doing it, he reflects on the mechanics of translation. And what really emerges from the book is that translation is not about words. It’s about really taking the essence of one culture, of one worldview, and allowing somebody else to see through those eyes, to almost put on those glasses, so it has the same resonance. And this is something that is not just literary or philosophical or psychological.

I think this is something that is deeply mystical at the heart of the Jewish project of what Yiddishkeit is supposed to represent for the world. It’s kind of this cultural translation, not that we’re trying to get the rest of the world to be Jewish, but when you translate the Jewish experience to other cultures to allow people to look through the Jewish experience and in their own lives, make peace and negotiate with their unchosen identity, which is what Jewish identity is all about, I think is really this notion of cultural translation is at the heart of Yiddishkeit itself. Venivrechu vecho kol mishpechos ho’adomoh. It is through the Jewish people that all nations, all families are able to find themselves more. I don’t think that’s a promise that everybody looks at the Jewish people and wants to become Jewish.

That’s not a Jewish value. The Jewish value, I believe, is being able to translate the Jewish experience and Jewish values for the entire world. And there is a beautiful piece in Likutey Moharan by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. In the 19th piece, the 19th chapter, Rabbi Nachman actually spends a great deal of time talking about the power of translation.

And my dear friend and former 18Forty guest, Rabbi Joey Rosenfeld, once wrote based on this piece in Likutey Moharan, where he explains that for Rabbi Nachman, the light of translation is the possibility of the essence undergoing a process of change so significant that it can now be found in the inessential. Yet through some impossible power, it retains its essential nature. Being able to expand what we consider the essence, giving somebody the experience of what Yiddishkeit is all about, being able to take the experience of Hasidic life and provide a window for the world and most importantly for other Jews, not so every Jew can become Hasidic, not so every Jew can move to Borough Park, but that we’re able to see the beauty in that hyper-local story. And through that beauty, through that very hyper-local story, when we peer through that window, like any window, what we’re ultimately able to see is not only through it, but reflect back at our own lives.

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